Yummy Chocolate Cupcakes

For me, there's never enough chocolate. I've taken chocolate classes -- learning to temper chocolate and produce tasty bonbons. So, there's always a supply of chocolate in my pantry. So this recipe was bound to please -- chocolate cake with chocolate ganache frosting. These were so easy to make -- just love them. I added a sprinkling of orange sugar to for Halloween. As usual, I gave most of them away! Check out Clara of I Heart Food4Thought for the recipe.

I got carried away with the pictures this week but enjoy.

TWD - Pumpkin Muffins - What Not To Do

What not to do is mis-read the ingredient list and decorate your muffins with salty pumpkin seeds and be extra generous with the seeds. It didn't even taste good, didn't look like the muffins in Dorie's cookbook -- what was I thinking?

What to do then, is to carefully pick off the offending decoration! Much better, but don't look too closely.

Orange - Walnut Biscotti

This week's TWD recipe is perfect as gifts for friends. The ones I made are going to England with me today and will be a little gift to my hosts there. I packed them into decorative cello bags and they look quite impressive.

But back to the recipe. I'm not a fan of almond flavor and I could tell from the list of ingredients that the almond flavor would be overwhelming to my palate. So I substituted orange extract for the almond extract and used chopped walnuts. The result was outstanding -- mild orange flavor and the crunchy walnuts.

To the suitcase!